Iraq

February 27, 2011 – Links International
Journal of Socialist Renewal -- The late South African anti-apartheid poet-activist
Dennis Brutus occasionally used “Seattle”, the name of a city in the
northwestern United States, as a verb. We should “seattle
Copenhagen”, he said in late 2009, to prevent the global North from doing a climate
deal in their interests, against Africa’s.

Protesters chant anti-Iraqi government slogans during a protest at
Tahrir Square in Baghdad, Iraq, on February 25, 2011. Thousands of
demonstrators converged on central Baghdad as part of an anti-government
rally inspired by uprisings across the Middle East and dubbed the "Day
of Rage". Photo: Karim Kadim
/ AP.

December 15, 2010 -- Salon -- Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old US Army private accused of leaking
classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that
crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at
the US Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months -- and for
two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait -- under conditions
that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of
many nations, even torture. Interviews with several people directly
familiar with the conditions of Manning's detention, ultimately
including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard), who confirmed
much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is
subject to detention conditions likely to create long-term
psychological injuries.

December 7, 2010 -- "The
Australian government should defend and support Wikileaks and its
founder Julian Assange and their efforts to expose the lies,
duplicities and outright crimes of the US government and its allies",
said Peter Boyle, national convener of the Socialist Alliance on December 7.

"We condemn the Australian government for collaborating with the US government in hunting Julian Assange down. The exposure of classified US government cables and other material
by Wikileaks is an enormous plus for all those who are fighting for
truth and democracy, and against war and exploitation. Wikileaks and
Assange deserve our strongest support.

December 2, 2010 -- PolEconAnalysis -- There is a growing chorus of voices in the media and the academy singling out the actions of the Chinese state as central to the dilemmas of the world economy. This focus finds its most articulate presentations, not in the xenophobia of the right, but in the polite analysis of many left-liberals.

Paul Krugman, for instance, writing in the run-up to November’s G20 summit in South Korea, praised the United States’ approach of creating money out of nothing (“quantitative easing”) as being helpful to the world economy, and criticised the Chinese state’s attempts to keep its currency weak as being harmful.
“The policies of these two nations are not at all equivalent”, he
argues, adding his influential voice to the chorus which is increasingly
targeting China for the world’s woes.[1] Krugman’s, however, is a
simplistic analysis which overlooks the role of the US over decades in
creating huge imbalances in the world economy, and has the dangerous
effect of scapegoating one of the poorest nations of the world (China)
for the problems created by the world’s richest.

October 22, 2010 -- The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico represents the latest in a series
of atrocities committed by petroleum companies against the environment
and against humanity. Yet, terrible and tragic as the BP spill is, it is
merely a marginal event in the long and sordid history of the oil
companies in US and world history. The petroleum companies have
been at the centre of US politics for a hundred years,
determining its domestic agenda, its environmental policy and its
foreign policy. To be a US politician was to be baptised in oil.
To be an admiral or a general was to be a warrior around the globe for
the petroleum industry.

Foreign policy

By
the 1920s, with the rise of the internal combustion engine and the
automobile, and the conversion of the US Navy from coal to oil,
petroleum became the most sought after commodity in the world. Oil
became a strategic commodity, a necessity of modern life and modern
warfare. From that time on, the oil corporations moved to the centre of US politics. President Warren G. Harding’s cabinet was known as
the “oil gang”, and the cabinet-level corruption involved in the attempt
of private parties and corporations to get at the navy oil reserves led
to the Teapot Dome scandal, for which Harding’s administration is best
remembered.

December 15, 2009 -- The antipathy of mainstream Australian society toward Muslims is not a new development. As early as 1912, Australians were being cautioned about the danger of Australia falling under Islamic control. The adoption of camel transport had brought Muslim men from Afghanistan to Australia in increasing numbers from 1860 until they controlled the camel transport business. Despite their valuable contribution to the expeditions carried out by the European “explorers” and their vital role in establishing a transport system in the harsh outback conditions, the early Muslim immigrants were considered inferior to the dominant, white, Christian Europeans and marginalised in a similar way to the
detribalised Aboriginal community.[1]

[This article was first published on
September 11, 2002, on the first anniversary of the September 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Its observations remain
relevant to this day.]

* * *

In the week before the first anniversary of the devastating September
11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, TV networks aired
a seemingly never-ending string of ``special events'' featuring ``exclusive''
or ``never before seen'' footage of the collapse of the twin towers of the
World Trade Center (WTC) and its aftermath. People around the world again
experienced the horror, anger and tragedy of that terrible day, when almost
3000 working people were murdered.

Culminating on the anniversary of the day itself, thousands of journalists
and TV presenters from across the globe will converge at ``ground zero''
in New York for ``remembrance and reflection''. Solemn ceremonies will be
telecast and patriotic speeches by top US politicians broadcast, restating
Washington's determination to pursue its ``war on terrorism''.

January 23, 2009 -- More than 1 million people gathered in bitter cold in Washington DC to witness the historical inauguration of an African American as president.

The crowd was disproportionately Black, but majority white — and
jubilant. Celebrations were held in Black communities throughout the
country, and in other sectors of the population.

He was sworn in by his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, itself
historic. In the aftermath of the election, he enjoys overwhelming
support according to polls, far higher than his margin of votes. This
indicates a large swing of whites among those who voted for the
Republican candidate John McCain.

Hopes are running high that he will do something to turn around the
accelerating downturn in the economy. On “inauguration day”, it
appeared that the crisis in the banks and other financial institutions
was once again critical.

With rising unemployment, rising home foreclosures, falling wages,
failing retail chains and US$1 trillion poured down what one economist
called a bottomless pothole to apparently no avail, the working and
middle classes have experienced a massive shock.

The “free markets will solve all” ideology is a dead duck. US
people are demanding that the government take action. Obama has
promised to do just that.

By now, you've all seen the footage of the Iraqi journalist hurling his shoes at George W. Bush during a press conference in Baghdad on December 14, 2008. See below.

What has not been so widely reported are the words Muntadar al-Zaidi, a correspondent for Cairo-based al-Baghdadiya TV, shouted. As the first shoe was thrown at Bush, he said: "This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog." And with his second shoe, which the president also dodged, al-Zaidi said: "This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq."

October 31, 2008 -- In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, bombings of the World Trade Center and Pentagon, US President George Bush declared an open-ended, apparently indefinite “war on terror”.

Using the terrorist attacks as an excuse, the “war on terror” has meant a war drive to extend US global domination. The threats were free flowing — at one point as many as seven nations
were part of the “axis of evil” and therefore potential military
targets as Bush threatened “pre-emptive strikes” against US “enemies”.

The war drive began with the 2001 invasion and occupation of
Afghanistan. In 2003, in the face of massive global protests, the US
launched its invasion of oil-rich Iraq.

Facing sustained resistance from the Iraqi people, and increasingly
unpopular at home, the failure of the Iraqi occupation has contributed
to making the Bush presidency one of the least popular in history.

Campaigning for the White House, Democratic Party candidate Barack
Obama has made much of his initial vote against the war in 2003.

September 14, 2008 -- Socialist Voice -- The nomination of Barack Obama as the presidential candidate of the
Democratic Party is historic. He is the first African American
presidential candidate of one of the two major capitalist parties. He
may win the election and become the first black president, something
inconceivable only two years ago. That a black man might become head of
government in a society still marked by ingrained racism puts race at
the centre of the election campaign — more on this below.

Obama gave his acceptance speech at the end of the Democratic Party
convention to some 84,000 people. Such a turnout for a presidential
candidate is itself unprecedented. During the Democratic Party primary
campaign Obama regularly spoke to audiences of thousands. He has raised
hopes in a nation weary of war and which is in a worsening economic
downturn hitting workers and the middle class hard.

Since its landmark publication in 1980, A People’s History of the United States has had six new editions, sold more than 1.7 million copies and been turned into
an acclaimed play. More than a successful book, A People’s History
triggered a revolution in the way history is told, displacing the
official versions with their emphasis on great men in high places to
chronicle events as they were lived, from the bottom up.

August 28, 2002 -- On August 18, 2002, the New York Times
carried a front-page story headlined, “Officers say U.S. aided Iraq
despite the use of gas”. Quoting anonymous US “senior military
officers”, the NYT “revealed” that in the 1980s, the
administration of US President Ronald Reagan covertly provided
“critical battle planning assistance at a time when American
intelligence knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons
in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war”. The story made a
brief splash in the international media, then died.

While the August 18 NYT
article added new details about the extent of US military collaboration
with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during Iraq's 1980-88 war with Iran,
it omitted the most outrageous aspect of the scandal: not only did
Washington turn a blind-eye to the Hussein regime's repeated use of
chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and Iraq's Kurdish minority,
but the US helped Iraq develop its chemical, biological and nuclear
weapons programs.

September 11, 2002 -- In the week before the first anniversary of the devastating September
11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, TV networks aired
a seemingly never-ending string of ``special events'' featuring ``exclusive''
or ``never before seen'' footage of the collapse of the twin towers of the
World Trade Center (WTC) and its aftermath. People around the world again
experienced the horror, anger and tragedy of that terrible day, when almost
3000 working people were murdered.

Culminating on the anniversary of the day itself, thousands of journalists
and TV presenters from across the globe will converge at ``ground zero''
in New York for ``remembrance and reflection''. Solemn ceremonies will be
telecast and patriotic speeches by top US politicians broadcast, restating
Washington's determination to pursue its ``war on terrorism''.

But by the end of the 9/11 anniversary hoopla, after the thousands of
hours of TV time and the column-kilometres published in the world's newspapers
and magazines, you can be sure that the most glaring aspect of the post-9/11
period will have remained unmentionable by all but the most honest commentators:
that Washington's ``war on terrorism'' is a cynical fraud.

May 5, 2004 -- Even while working people were still coming to terms with
the shock of witnessing the unimaginable and traumatic collapse of the
World Trade Center, top US officials were describing this mass-murder
of 3000 people as “an opportunity”, recent books by government
“insiders” and Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward have revealed.

As
the country went into mourning, Bush's war cabinet quickly began to
coolly debate just how soon it could get away with shifting the enemy
in its coming “war on terrorism” to Iraq, a country that had absolutely
nothing to do with the attacks.

In the days that followed September 11, 2001, the US rulers
immediately recognised that those awful acts of mass murder had
provided them with a golden opportunity to achieve the US capitalist
ruling class' long-held objective of unchallenged world domination —
the “American century” it predicted was at hand at the end of World War
II.

`Topic A'

In January, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill
was published. O'Neill, a former CEO of the giant Alcoa corporation,
was Bush's treasury secretary until December 2002, when he was sacked.

By Rohan Pearce"I canâ€™t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today will last five days, five weeks or five months, but it wonâ€™t last any longer than thatâ€â€”US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, cnn, November 15, 2002.

â€œNow, I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberatorsâ€â€”US Vice President Dick Cheney, NBCâ€™s Meet the Press, March 16, 2003.